code within an html form

[David Thompson]

>What I am trying to do is put parentheses around 
>the text field ³Yr² only if there is a year in 
>the field.  If the field is empty, then I don¹t 
>want anything showing up on the html form.  Here 
>is what I have tried.  The code words fine if I 
>just put in the parenthesis statement without a 
>condition.
>
>{Name+?(Type="R","",?(Yr>² ³," ("+Yr+")",² ³))}
>
>Type is text that can be T, F or R.  If it is R, 
>then there is no name posted.  If there is a 
>name and the year exists in the field, I want it 
>to look like this:
>(10), so that I would have Jim Smith (10), if 
>there is no year in the field, it would just 
>have Jim Smith.
>
>Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm not sure if that's the way that you actually 
wrote it, or if your email has changed some of 
the straight quotes to curly quotes. (In this 
email the curly quotes may look like something 
else altogether.) If those really are curly 
quotes, they appear to be in the wrong order. You 
seem to be opening the quotes with a close quote, 
and closing with an open quote. I see no reason 
why

{Name+?(Type="R","",?(Yr>" "," ("+Yr+")"," "))}

shouldn't work. The formula above just uses 
straight quotes everywhere, instead of straight 
quotes for some of the strings, and curly quotes 
for others. Another way to go about it would be 
to use the sandwich( function.

{Name + " "  + sandwich("(",Yr,")")}

For those that  don't  know what you are doing as 
intimately as I do, the term "html form" in this 
case refers to a Panorama form designed to be 
used with a SaveAsText command. The text it 
generates is html. Formulas are in auto wrap text 
objects, so they must be enclosed in {braces}.

I think comparing Yr to a space is actually 
better than comparing it to a blank. A space is 
the largest of the white space characters, and I 
don't think you want to have a pair of 
parentheses with nothing but white space between 
them.

Dave